Byte Through

A couple days ago, after installing Firefox 3.6, i noticed it went from bad to worse on resource usage, at least on my test computer it seems to have gone really bad, why? take a look at this pic:

So what’s wrong here? i just had three open tabs, none of them on heavy flash or java sites,  just a couple simple forums and one blog,  my test machine is not a top model, but this is not what’s wrong, i have a test PC with a 2.8 Ghz processor, 2 GB of ram and a 500 GB SATA II drive, NVIDIA FX5500 video card with 256MB of video memory, Windows XP SP2, this should be more than enough for web browsing, specially when nothing else is open but Firefox, and yet the computer gets so slow that opening something like Windows Live Mail or Messenger took some minutes, and switching between both Firefox and Mail/Messenger took several seconds, there were drawing issues, eventually Firefox took about 94 % of the CPU, and memory usage went up to 1 GB, crashing the computer, i was not able to save a screen shot or do anything but to reset the machine, the thing is, i had an older Firefox version installed on this same hardware with no issues at all, well, not like these at least, and i had Chrome and other software like Visual Studio which still works at top speed, by this i mean, it works very well on this hardware, is usable, given that Firefox is not running of course..

Yesterday i went on the net and noticed a couple of very nice reviews:

Here’s one at ArsTechnica

And another one at TechRadar

I’ll quote from the last link (emphasis mine):

There’s a brand new Firefox in town: Firefox 3.6. It’s not a huge update, but it does offer improved performance and stability

I guess we all do live in different worlds, could it be maybe that what we have here is a classical example of developers forgetting about all of those who do not have/can’t afford top of the line hardware? and that they are developing this software on their high end computers, where they can’t see the end result as seen by people with old hardware, really, who cares about them, let them buy new modern hardware for once right? have we fallen into the ‘hardware is cheap/fast so don’t waste time optimizing and writing small/fast code” trap?

I’m a little saddened by this, since one of the top reasons to use open source used to be that open source software is smaller, faster, light, and a ton of other things, everything but bloated (as in MS software), but lately, seems they have fallen for the same mistakes we’ve been seeing for decades now in those MS-like companies (even them seem to be going small and fast, just look at the VS Express Editions and even Windows 7 against Vista), it could be interesting maybe to go look up who is working on Firefox right now, and see if the people who used to work on it a few years ago are still working on it today, i wonder about that..

(yeah, i know working on a software piece this big is no child play, but Mozilla used to have very good developers)

What happened?

No joy here, just complaining you know :P